Who are you to question God? Who are you to question us!!
Those are Eliphaz’s comments to Job as the second round of speeches begin in chapter 15, but his position is that nothing bad happens to good people.
Job is in the depths of despair now. He describes himself as gaunt, with a breath so hideous that his wife cannot ignore it. He feels crushed and disemboweled and in this great grief, he tells his friends what he really needs from them. He wants them to speak words of comfort to him. He wants them to pray for him.
And interestingly, he believes that someone is praying for him – just not among his friends on the earth. He believes he has an “advocate” in heaven (16:20-22) who is pleading his case and though he sees no hope that his situation will change, in the end, he believes he will see God. “How my heart yearns within me!” he writes (19:27).
If you believed God had wronged you, would you be so eager to see Him?
Job’s “patience” is not that he endured trial without comment, but that he continued to find hope in God in the most desperate of times.